prisma - HSG-Studentenmagazin

Tag Archive: climate

  1. STARTing to be more sustainable

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    The fight against climate change already is and will continue to be one of the colossal challenges humankind faces. Is START Summit the right place to look for innovative ideas of brilliant minds that will solve this issue for us? Well, it’s not going to be that easy, but prisma was listening to some talks and panels including young companies that are at least trying.

    Emit less, remove more

    As everybody should know by now, the emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane or nitrous oxide, are the central issue in this whole climate change problem. Society and individuals should reduce their carbon footprints to alleviate the worst consequences of an alternated climate. Tell you what, that doing it alone is not going to cut it for us to reach net zero. What if we could just find a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere? Carbon removal seems like a great idea, at least if we can push the boundaries of existing technologies to reduce the massive cost that currently comes with it. The panel discussion revolved around two main ideas about how carbon removal is possible. First up, nature-based solutions are building on initiatives like reforestation projects to foster the amount of CO2 the environment can store for us. Thank you trees! Companies like goodcarbon and OCELL are both on a mission to provide investors with CO2 certificates stemming from projects that make a concrete impact by relying on technology, science, and the careful selection of project initiatives. The second option is a technological one building on the direct removal of CO2 from the air. However, this solution by the Swiss company Climeworks, providing this service to businesses eager to offset their emissions, is still only available at high costs, requires a vast amount of electricity and seems difficult to scale. No wonder the company representative stated that the cheapest way to remove a ton of CO2 is not to emit it in the first place.

    Consume at the greenest point in time

    This is one of the incentives provided to customers of Ostrom, a German-based start-up with the mission to provide green electricity for all, while offering a service at cost to emphasize the goal of reducing overall energy consumption. And the best part: Through an app, consumers are always aware of how much electricity they use, what they pay for it, and to be sure it came from a renewable source. Additionally, owners of electric vehicles, like the fancy Porsche Taycan they showed off to all summit attendees, can profit from a smart feature that allows them to charge their car at the cheapest and greenest point in time. Ostrom’s solution might not build on complex algorithms. However, in a market landscape in which established electricity providers mostly send out paper bills and customer support can only be reached by calling a hotline, maybe a fully digital service is enough to be innovative.

    Protein shakes, but it’s material science

    The last idea I want to share with you might not be the most obvious on the journey to reach our sustainability goal. Cambrium, another German start-up in the field of material science, innovates to find new ways to create materials for cosmetics or fashion while not relying on crude oil or proteins like animal collagens. Don’t ask me how they do this, it’s probably very scientific, but they said they are using our best friend AI to find protein structures that serve the required need of a materials properties such as skin compatibility. As the materials are created using yeast and fermentation instead of the common resources mentioned above, they not only fulfil the necessary performance specifications to be relevant for later processing, but also make products more sustainable and potentially bio-degradable.

    What every one of us can do

    That’s for you to decide, but the opportunities seem to be there, we just need to seize them. No worries, this will not be a lecture now, we have enough lectures every week. Speaking of lectures though: If you are interested in solutions to climate change and want to deepen your knowledge in this field of research, maybe the Master Certificate Managing Climate Solutions (MaCS) is something for you

  2. Saving the Planet

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    Last May at the St. Gallen Symposium I had an interesting conversation with Connie Hedegaard, formerly Minister for Environment and Minister for Climate and Energy in Denmark as well as European Commissioner for Climate Action. Unfortunately, there were a lot of things going on at the time and I never got to fully transcribe and publish the interview. „Better late than never“ might be a good motto for the current climate conference in Paris as well as for tardy journalists. Given the regained timeliness, I would like to, at least partially, serve justice to the reader as well as to Mrs. Hedegaard by sharing some of her insights on climate policy.

    Mrs. Hedegaard, you are a political conservative, yet you are very engaged on the topics of environmental protection and climate change, a rather atypical combination. How did it come so?

    I was out of politics for 40 years and already had the portfolio of environment when the liberal-conservative government (elected in 2001) asked me to become minister for environment in 2004. They had cut back a lot on the environment and I wanted to stop that trend. However, to be clear, I don’t think there is any contradiction between being conservative and wanting to protect the environment. On the contrary, if you look at conservatism as a philosophy, taking care for future generations lies at the very heart of it. Conserving the environment should be a natural part of conservatism. So, ever since I have been a young politician back in the 1980s, I have thought that it would be extremely stupid ,if we are not serious about protecting the environment right of the center. Why on earth should being “green” be considered a socialist thing? A leftist system isn’t inherently better at taking care of the environment, just look at the Soviet Union or China.

    After your term as environment minister you became the first EU commissioner for Climate Change and were greatly involved in organising the UNCCC in Copenhagen in 2009. However, many European observers were disappointed with the results. What were the biggest obstacles hindering a greater international commitment to stop the climate change?

     You could speculate all sorts of things, who was blocking what, who did not have enough political will and so on, but the big difference between Copenhagen and the upcoming Conference in Paris is that in 2009 China and the US both, consciously or unconsciously, could see that the other power would not move and therefore both came unprepared to actually move their own position. However, over the last years the pressure has mounted enormously on the Obama Administration as well as on China. When President Obama and President Xi Jinping came together in November 2014 and publicly acknowledged that their countries, as the two biggest emitters, have a special responsibility to stop climate change, this marked a turning point. Had those two really wanted to “play ball” in Kopenhagen the result could have been different.

    While it goes without saying that many of us wanted more out of Copenhagen, we nevertheless achieved progress. In the run-up to Copenhagen Europe was basically alone in setting emissions targets, after Copenhagen 90 countries set domestic climate targets. In Copenhagen we also established the limit of two degrees celsius of global warming. 2013 was the first year ever in the history of mankind, where the newly installed energy capacity of renewables was greater than that of fossils. As far as I can see there is a profound change underway. Things are happening. However, the success criteria for Paris has to be that when that conference is over, it is still likely that the World will remain below the threshold of two degrees.

    Connie Hedegaard

    Europe has always been a force pushing towards more action on climate change. Do we simply have it easier than others to reduce emissions, because we already have high absolute levels of emission and little to no growth? What do you say to developing countries, who want their “chance at polluting the world” as well?

    Of course nobody would ask India, who still has 400 Million people without access to electricity to do the same as Europe or the US. However, the world simply cannot tackle climate change, if we continue in the pattern of old UNFCCC talks, where many thought that only the developed countries should agree on binding goals, while developing countries, including China, should only do things voluntarily. From a European perspective the biggest achievement of the climate conference in Durban 2011 was to get rid of this firewall. Of course, we in the rich countries have to do more than developing countries, but all of us have a responsibility and all of us will have to pursue a low carbon development track.

    Furthermore, it is not all that easy for Europe. Last year both Germany as well as Britain were able to reduce their carbon emissions significantly while growing in terms of GDP. The European Union has set the new goal of cutting emissions by 40% until 2030 through domestic action. That is a substantial contribution.

    Over the last years tensions between the West and Russia have increased. What effect on climate policy does the European dependence on Russian fossil fuels have?

    Bulgaria, Slovakia, Rumania, all those countries who are most dependent on Russia, tend to also have the most inefficient energy consumption. Why? Because everytime Bulgaria wants to increase its energy efficiency, Putin lowers the gas price in order to undermine the effort. Energy independence was THE argument to bring countries more hesitant regarding climate change, as for example Poland, to agree on the 2030 emission goals. In a crisis year like 2012 we paid a huge economic bill of about 400 billion Euros net in Europe for our imported fossil fuels and about a third of that amount we sent to Russia. Last year due the situation in Eastern Europe a lot of people started to realize what the political costs of energy dependence are as well. The time to get the “boring stuff” like the interconnectors and the grid done, in order to move forward with the energy union, is now. If the Crimean crisis has not been a strong enough wake-up call for European leaders, I don’t know what could be.